'Samsara' invites us to connect with the world

Susan Sontag concluded her book "On Photography" with a plea for "an ecology of images," an approach to making and reproducing photographs that would protect both the meaning of particular pictures and the integrity of the reality they depict.

Since the 1970s, when the essays in Sontag's book were written, the global glut of images has grown almost beyond measure. In the age of Instagram and Google Earth, it is easy to believe that every inch of the planet, every human face and patch of wilderness, has been snapped up and uploaded. We have seen it all.

Ron Fricke's new film, "Samsara," shot in a grand and vibrant 70-millimeter format -- including some remarkable time-lapse photography -- is partly a Sontagian case for sustainability. Or, to adapt the food-obsessed ecological language of the moment, it presents a visual argument for slow looking, for careful, meditative attention to what is seen.

A spool of arresting, beautifully composed shots without narration or dialogue, "Samsara" is an invitation to watch closely and to suspend interpretation.

The film's title is a Sanskrit word that means "the ever-turning wheel of life," and a loose and sometimes playful sense of the connectedness of everything pervades its 99 minutes. Traveling across 25 countries, to cities and rural outposts, you are invited to notice resemblances. People in factories and animals in factory farms, worshippers and prisoners, dancers and undulating waves -- these things exist in a visual and choreographic harmony that allows you to infer themes that link them: work in the global economy, the state of the environment, interactions and collisions between industry and nature.

But arresting as these images are, they may also be familiar, especially if you have been keeping up with the spate of documentaries that investigate the state of the modern world. The chickens and pigs in processing plants might remind you of "Food Inc.," while shots of crowded Third World slums, Chinese sulfur mines and transvestite prostitutes seem drawn from the lexicon of photojournalism and cinematic consciousness-raising.

The only way to restore the power of images in a world inundated with them is, it seems, to make more, and to produce a context that will make them strange rather than obvious to the point of invisibility. Fricke did something like that 20 years ago with his film "Baraka," a precursor to "Samsara," and both films owe a debt to the work of Godfrey Reggio, on whose 1982 film "Koyaanisqatsi" Fricke worked as a cinematographer.

Reggio's "Qatsi" trilogy, with its Philip Glass music and its rapid cascade of intuitively associated images, stands as a monument of socially conscious head-trip cinema. "Baraka" and "Samsara" seem, in comparison, more accessible and perhaps a little softer. While they do challenge the viewer's habits of perception -- wrenching us temporarily out of our addiction to story and into a state of reflective reverie -- they are also likely to soothe as much as they provoke.

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